Comment VM vs LPAR (Score 3, Informative) 251
With the introduction of XA architecture in the late 80's, IBM moved some of the virtualization technology down into the hardware, they created a new instruction, SIE - Start Interpretive Execution that could tap into this facility. This facility ended up being the heart of both LPARs and VM/XA (which grew into current z/VM). Conceptually the SIE instruction, or the LPAR facility saves the current processor context, and starts a new context. The "guest" system (or the LPAR) now runs in this new context until some condition has been met (e.g. certain timer pops, certain state changes, etc, as defined by the meta-system (z/VM or the base system managing the LPARs). The movement of this function down into hardware was a logical extension of what used to be called hardware VM assists in pre-XA days.
Basically the base hardware provides LPARs (in fact for quite some time IBM mainframes can only run in LPAR mode, even if one has only one system image). LPARs allow sharing of the physical processors, sharing of physical I/O devices, and partitioning of physical memory. With an LPAR you cannot exceed the physical resources available, meaning that you cannot define an LPAR image with more processors then are physically available, or give an LPAR image more memory then is physically available. This is where z/VM comes in.
z/VM provides the ability to virtualize the physical resources. You can define a VM guest with more memory then is physically available, or more processors then are physically available. In addition z/VM can provide virtualized I/O devices, or provide more fine grained partitioning of physical devices (e.g. carving a disk volume into a collecting of smaller volumes in what is called mini-disks -- which are not the same as a disk partition).